Inside Cliff Cafe and Zlok: How Founder Sandeep Gandi Found a Method to His Madness at Bower LEAD

Inside Cliff Cafe and Zlok: How Founder Sandeep Gandi Found a Method to His Madness at Bower LEAD

Walk into Cliff Cafe in Hyderabad, and you will witness a lively current of conversations, coffee, and creativity. Founders are pitching in one corner, artists are sketching in another, and laughter from an open mic drifts across the room. The space, much like its founder Sandeep Gandi, refuses to fit neatly into one category. It’s a café, a co-working hub, a community space — and, in many ways, a reflection of Sandeep’s own unpredictable but purposeful journey.

“It’s all happened organically,” he says. “My necessity has always become my opportunity.” That sentence neatly captures his path from architect to filmmaker to entrepreneur; a path defined less by planning than by an appetite for risk and reinvention.

Curiosity as a compass

Sandeep graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University (JNAFAU), Hyderabad. Soon after, he joined his friends in Bengaluru as a creative partner for an architectural firm that they were building. It was a natural start for someone trained in design, but the business wasn’t easy.

“I was from a very humble background from a tier 2 city, unlike my partners, who came from financially well-off families. While the work was fun, I soon started struggling in the city. Most of what I was earning was going out to pay the rent there. There was a point when I was struggling even for food. And I did not want to ask my father for money – not because he couldn’t have afforded it, but I felt that if you’ve chosen to stand on your own, you have to face it,” he reminisces. 

So, he got back to Hyderabad and this time to try something new – filmmaking, a passion of his. While architecture gave him structure, filmmaking offered freedom. He leaped into writing, directing, and editing short films. His father wasn’t thrilled at first, but Sandeep convinced him to let him try for a year. “I told him, if I fail, it’s fine. But let me try it once,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to live my life thinking, what if I had done it?”

Filmmaking was exhilarating, but also humbling. He realized that creativity without resources could be a tough road. Within a year, he returned to architecture, not as a retreat, but as a recalibration. His firm quickly found success; the projects multiplied, the money followed, and his work began to speak for itself. Yet comfort, he admits, makes him uneasy. “When some comfort hits me, I feel bad,” he laughs. “I always want that bit of pain that pushes me to fight for something new.”

Turning spaces into opportunities

That restlessness eventually found its next expression in the most mundane of problems: rent. When Sandeep decided to share a room in his apartment, he posted it online,  and the response sparked an idea. “I put one room for flat-sharing online,” he recalls. “Suddenly, my liabilities became my assets.”

It was a small moment of discovery that opened up a new way of thinking. Space itself — not just what was built inside it — could become an entrepreneurial playground. From there, the idea evolved into Cliff Cafe, a 13,000-square-foot co-working and networking hub launched in Jan 2025.

Most people warned him against it. “Everyone said, who’s going to take the co-working space in Madhapur?” he smiles. “But I thought, however it is, I’ll do it.” The decision turned out to be right. Within eight months, Cliff Cafe was fully occupied and buzzing with activity, hosting stand-up shows, art workshops, and founder meetups every week.

For Sandeep, it wasn’t about renting desks. It was about building a community where people could “work, connect, and create.” Cliff Cafe became that living, breathing ecosystem: a place where Hyderabad’s creative and startup circles intersected over caffeine and collaboration.

The next leap: Zlok

Success at Cliff Cafe gave Sandeep something even more valuable than validation — clarity. He began to see how people’s needs to live, work, and connect were all fragmented, even though they flowed naturally into one another. Out of that insight came his next venture, Zlok.

“Space is the most valuable thing after gold,” he explains. “It’s limited, and it has to be managed smartly.”

Zlok is designed to integrate living spaces, co-working hubs, and community cafés under a single subscription model, blending the flexibility of co-living with the networking power of co-working. In his words, “It’s like a mix of WeWork, Airbnb, and BookMyShow.”

Getting there wasn’t linear. “In one month, I pivoted four times,” he says, half laughing at the memory. “I kept jumping, changing the model again and again until I got it right. Now, I know what I want to work on for a lifetime.”

Finding a method to the madness

If his early years were powered by instinct, joining the LEAD program marked a shift — from pure passion to strategic precision. “Till then, I was running purely on madness,” he admits. “LEAD helped me find a method to my madness; to build strategies, structures, and sustainability into what I was doing.”

The program gave him frameworks to think more systematically, but it also expanded his network in ways he hadn’t imagined. “At LEAD, you can directly meet market leaders,” he says. “Two months before, I didn’t even know MSR (Srinivas Rao Mahankali, former CEO of T-Hub; now he’s referred me to twenty people. That kind of access doesn’t happen easily.”

He likens LEAD to a wilderness of opportunity: “I see it like a wild forest — it has everything. What you can extract from it depends on how hungry you are.”

The program also became a platform for new ideas. He launched a podcast while studying there, collaborating with mentors and peers who have since become part of his growing entrepreneurial network. In fact, some of his colleagues from the LEAD Venture Building classes are now also working from Cliff Cafe. 

Madness, refined

Today, Sandeep stands at the intersection of creativity and commerce, expanding Cliff Cafe, scaling Zlok, and learning with every pivot. His journey has never been about getting it right the first time, but about being brave enough to try, fail, and build again.

“I still experiment, fail, and pivot,” he says. “But now I do it with a system. LEAD didn’t change my madness; it gave it direction.”

In an age that celebrates instant success, Sandeep’s story is a reminder that real entrepreneurship lies somewhere between chaos and clarity: where curiosity meets courage, and passion finally learns discipline.